The Mess at Nest Echos the Mess in the Smart Home

[Scottmichaelj]

The Mess at Nest Echos the Mess in the Smart Home

http://fortune.com/2016/03/24/mess-at-nest/

[Teken]

Yeah I read that article last night when it came in on the smart phone. It came as no great surprise to read Google decided to use another team to push their next project forward since Tony Fadell has been dicking around with the previous one. In another news article it was also mentioned Google is selling the robotics firm they bought back in the day.

 

It was also said since Amazon Echo has been such a huge hit Google is pushing forward to offer their own voice activated device.

[paulbates]

The tables have swung for me.... a year ago I was worried that the larger cloud-only based solutions would create so much momentum, that it would negatively impact the more focused, long established, highly integrated and technology agnostic HA solutions like the ISY. 

 

However, the reality turned out to be that most of these cloud-only based solutions have greatly over-promised and greatly under-delivered on a fully connected home vision..or in some cases go out of business altogether. Basically, a lot of dis-integrated piece and parts have been sold.

 

This makes a solution like the ISY more attractive.

[Scottmichaelj]

Just gonna leave this here.

 

[Xathros]

For me, the ISY is the glue that holds my semi-inteligent home together and keeps me from worrying too much about the clouds.

 

-Xathros

[Scottmichaelj]

I still am behind making the "Internet of things" aka IoT an open standard. Right now the market is flooded with tons of competing products and no one is really pushing the industry forward in any real way. I think the "protocol" should be agnostic and work with any and all devices. Then let the customers choose with their wallet what they want. Companies should be the manufacture of the devices and not pushing their own protocol. Maybe there should be some sort of committee made up of various companies to spec out the protocol like HDMI does? This way it consolidates things and helps actually move the industry forward. X10 is dead or almost dead, Insteon is by itself and has a bad name (getting MUCH better with Dual Band RF), Lutron RadioRA is expensive and only avail to AV installers, HomeKit hasn't really gone anywhere and companies are actually leaving it or said it was not worth going through with (IE Ecobee), ZWave has patents to deal with so that has been slow to adopt and move forward, nothing has come the rest of the startup companies that are really just toys, with short lifespans. Like Wink, etc. Instead of fighting with each other they should sit around the fire, sing cumbyya and roast marshmallows. There are plenty of people to go around to make money as the market share is so small now everyone can be profitable. Do I dare to say any one of these companies even has a substantial real eco system? Then again we would have to define and agree to what a "eco system" before we could even agree or disagree with my statement. 

 

Thats not to even think about the companies like Apple and Google, who, lets face it, really, are they really in the HA game? It all seems like a side project and hobby for them. Neither has a full system and only have a couple products that work together. It seems more like marketing they can toss on a product brochure to sound good. Either one could move things forward as they have the money and power if they really wanted to. But in the end if you want your Samsung fridge to talk with "X" then it really goes back to an open standard IoT.

 

As for the ISY, dont get me wrong I think its the best device out there for HA and for my needs but your still piecing things together to making this or that talk to each other. But the reason we can do it is because the protocol is there and open for us. Using the Network Resource allows us to control other nodes and now with Polygot we can use another node to control whatever else. Do I believe this is perfect, no, there are many things I feel the UD team could do differently to make things better, starting with making a new product so we dont need another node/Pi! Or adding plugins like the Vera so we dont have what I call "bandaid side programs" to interact with and break. They should be directly running on the ISY, possibly in a sandbox with devs getting a slice of sales. I also think the ISY needs to get off the Smarthome bandwagon just in case SH decides to cut the partnership or if SH finally gets things right with a real hub. T

 

Right now I compare the HA world to Android, its very fragmented, with everyone having a different idea of what "Home Automation" is, and with no real direction. Not to mention the people that suffer are the consumers whom are throughly confused by this mess.

[stusviews]

The title is misinforming. It's not, "the mess in Smarthome," it's "the mess in the smart home."

[Scottmichaelj]

The title is misinforming. It's not, "the mess in Smarthome," it's "the mess in the smart home."

 

Fixed, thanks for pointing that out. Auto Correct!